Archive for the 'Usability Toolbox' topic

I’m very excited about our upcoming Virtual Seminar presented by my good friend, Larry Constantine. If your team is facing an aggressive deadline for your web site or product launch and you don’t have the time or resources to conduct in-depth user research, you’ll want to gather everyone around for Larry’s presentation on September 27th. […]

Because there’s a large number of design agents and stake holders involved and often a small number of available tests to observe, we can find ourselves in a situation where we need to have many observers in one session. It’s not unusual to have 30 or more observers sitting in a single usability test. Here’s how we pull it off.

UIEtips 9/11/07: 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages It’s hard enough creating usable designs when there is ample time and plenty of resources, but what do you do when that’s just not an option for your design team? One of the most common reasons designs fail users is because the design team didn’t have […]

Jared M. Spool recently had the chance to talk with Steve Mulder about how to create effective personas based on user research as well as valuable tips for convincing your organization to adopt personas into the design process.

We’re big fans of the KJ Technique, a method that helps teams rank the important issues for a focus question, such as “What are the most important usability problems we need to fix in this version of the design?” or “Which user populations are most important to our business?” In the method, teams brainstorm on […]

UIEtips 8/21/07: Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products At User Interface Engineering, we’ve spent two decades researching the usability and design techniques employed by both successful and unsuccessful development teams. We’ve focused our research agenda on identifying the key techniques successful teams utilize to consistently produce usable products on time and within budget. Because […]

Using player cards as visual reminders of your personas and the people you met during field studies is a great way to help keep your users at the forefront of your design team’s thoughts. Here’s a rough guide on how to create them.

Ashley McKee points out a series of articles by Leisa Reichelt that discuss accepting the unscientific qualities of qualitative research, and using qualitative research as a flexible way to gather rich and insightful information about your intended audience.